December 2024 - Corpora

2nd CFP - AAAS-2025
by Kurimo Mikko 07 Apr '25

07 Apr '25

[Apologies for cross-posting] == Second Call for Papers and Extended Abstracts == 1st Workshop on Automatic Assessment of Atypical Speech (AAAS-2025) We would like to invite you to submit papers to AAAS workshop co-located with NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT<https://www.nodalida-bhlt2025.eu> in Hestia Hotel Europa in Tallinn, Estonia on March 5th, 2025. Workshop website: https://teflon.aalto.fi/aaas-2025/ == Important Dates == Submission DL: 16 December 2024 (both papers and abstracts) Notification of acceptance: 24 January 2025 Camera-ready DL: 3 February 2025 Workshop: 5 March 2025 (full day) All deadlines are 11:55PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth"). == Overview == Automatic Assessment of Atypical Speech (AAAS) explores the assessment of pronunciation and speaking skills of children, language learners, people with speech sound disorders and methods to provide automatic rating and feedback using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and large language models (LLMs). Automatic speaking assessment (ASA) is a rapidly growing field that answers to the need of developing AI tools for self-practising second and foreign language skills. This is not limited to pronunciation assessment, but the AI tools can also provide more complex feedback about fluency, vocabulary and grammar of the recorded speech. ASA is also very relevant for detection and quantification of speech disorders and for developing speech exercises that can be performed independent of time and place. The important applications of non-standard speech also include interfaces for children and elderly speakers as an alternative to using text input and output. The topic is timely, because the latest large speech models allow us now to develop ASR and classification methods for low-resourced data, such as atypical speech, where annotated training datasets are rarely available and expensive and difficult to produce and share. The goal of this workshop is to present the latest results in ASA and discuss the future work and collaboration between the researchers in Nordic and Baltic countries. == Topics of Interest == In particular, we would like to invite students, researchers, and other experts and stakeholders to contribute papers and/or join the discussion on the following (and related) topics: Automatic speaking assessment (ASA) for L2 (second or foreign language) pronunciation ASA for spoken L2 proficiency ASA for speech sound disorders (SSD) Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for L2 learners ASR for children and young L2 learners ASA and ASR for Nordic and other low-resource languages and tasks Spoken L2 learning and speech therapy using games Automatic generation of verbal feedback for spoken L2 learners using LLMs == Submission Details == We accept both short and long papers, as well as demo papers. The submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Paper length: Short and demo papers up to 4 pages. Long papers up to 8 pages. References are not included in the page count, and the camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be added to the page to address reviewer comments. Papers should describe original unpublished work or work-in-progress and will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee in a double-blind fashion. All accepted papers will be collected into a proceedings volume to be published in the ACL anthology. All submissions must follow the NoDaLida template, available in both LaTeX and MS Word. The links to the templates can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1osWGzuRnYRQGRS70Lx_pdQKrIT-NefKS/view https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/instructions-for-nodalida-baltic-h… The submission will be through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aaas2025 We also invite submissions of maximum 2-page long extended non-anonymous abstracts with any number of pages for references describing work in progress, negative results and opinion pieces. The abstracts, which should follow the same formatting templates as the peer-reviewed papers, will be considered for presentation by the workshop organisers and the accepted ones will be posted on the workshop website. The abstracts can be based on results related to our theme and already published elsewhere. The abstracts will not be published in the proceedings, but only in the workshop program. Please also consider volunteering to review 2-3 papers. == Invited Speakers == We have the pleasure to announce two invited speakers: 1. Nina R. Benway: What is so hard about AI Speech Therapy? Evidence from Efficacy Trials. Nina R Benway, PhD CCC-SLP, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering with Dr. Carol Espy-Wilson. Nina completed her doctoral training in speech-language pathology (concentration: neuroscience) with Dr. Jonathan Preston at Syracuse University, focusing on clinical trials in children with chronic rhotic speech sound disorders. The three studies of her dissertation resulted in the curation of an open-access 175,000-utterance speech corpus, the engineering of audio classification algorithms predicting speech-language pathologist perception of rhotic speech errors, and the clinical trial validation of an artificial intelligence tool that fully automates a speech sound treatment session. Nina’s doctoral training builds upon her undergraduate training in linguistics (acoustic phonetics) at Cornell University, graduate clinical training at The College of Saint Rose, and six years of clinical practice. Through these experiences Nina has refined a multidisciplinary skill set in speech science, speech signal processing, natural language processing, corpus phonetics, machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI), user interface development, cognitive frameworks of learning, and neurocomputational frameworks of speech production. 2. Ari Huhta: Automatic assessment of second/foreign language speaking: Review of developments for examination and teaching/learning purposes. Ari Huhta is a Professor of Language Assessment at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests include diagnostic foreign/second language (L2) assessment, computerised assessment, self-assessment, as well as the development of reading, writing and vocabulary knowledge in L2. He was involved in developing the large-scale multilingual DIALANG online assessment and feedback system in the early 2000s and since then he has specialised in assessments that support language learning. Although his research has focused on learning and assessing reading and writing, he has been involved in designing several rating scales for speaking and in evaluating rating quality and studying rater behavior. Recently, he has participated in research projects that are developing ASR and automated assessment of L2 speaking, as well as using LLMs to evaluate Finnish L2 learners’ proficiency level. == Organizers == Mikko Kurimo (chair), Aalto University, mikko.kurimo(a)aalto.fi Giampiero Salvi, NTNU Sofia Strömbergsson, Karolinska Institutet Sari Ylinen, Tampere University Minna Lehtonen, University of Turku Tamas Grosz, Aalto University Ekaterina Voskoboinik, Aalto University Yaroslav Getman, Aalto University Nhan Phan, Aalto University This workshop is supported by “Technology-enhanced foreign and second-language learning of Nordic languages (TEFLON)” https://teflon.aalto.fi/ NordForsk project nr. 103893. == Contact Information == For questions and comments, please email mikko.kurimo(a)aalto.fi

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Reminder: Call for participation in Web Survey on Data Bottlenecks in Supervised NLP
by Romberg, Julia 13 Jan '25

13 Jan '25

++ 1st reminder to participate in our web survey on data annotation bottlenecks and active learning; apologies for cross-posting ++ Dear list members, We invite you to participate in our web survey exploring how recent advancements in NLP, such as LLMs, have changed the need for labeled data in Supervised Machine Learning. Survey details: * Topic: Web survey on Data Annotation and Active Learning * Target group: Researchers and practitioners alike in the fields of NLP, Supervised Machine Learning, and Active Learning in particular (knowledge of Active Learning is not required) * Duration: 5-15 minutes * Deadline for participation: January 12, 2025 * Survey link: https://bildungsportal.sachsen.de/umfragen/limesurvey/index.php/538271 Why should I invest my time in this survey? * Make an impact: Participate in a community-effort and help to gain a better understanding of the current state and open issues on methods that are used to overcome a lack of labeled data. * Gain insights: Receive a report with key findings to incorporate these insights into research and development of new methods and technologies. Thank you for considering participating in our survey! If you have any questions or require additional information, please don't hesitate to contact us directly at activelearningsurvey2024(a)gmail.com<mailto:activeLearningSurvey2024@gmail.com>. If you know colleagues or peers who might be interested, we'd be grateful if you could forward this survey to them as well. Best regards, Julia Romberg (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany) Christopher Schröder (Institut für Angewandte Informatik e. V., Germany) Julius Gonsior (TUD Dresden University of Technology) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [gesis-logo-new-50-50] Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences Julia Romberg Computational Social Science, Team Data Science Methods +49(221)47694-742

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First CFP: LoResMT 2025 at NAACL 2025
by Atul K. Ojha 13 Jan '25

13 Jan '25

Apologies for cross-posting. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- *The Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025)* *https://www.loresmt.org/ <https://www.loresmt.org/>* *@ NAACL 2025 (May 3–4, 2025)* *Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A.* *SUBMISSION* * <https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2024/Workshop/LoResMT>https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2025/Workshop/LoResMT <https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2025/Workshop/LoResMT>* *TIMELINE* *Paper submission due:* January 30, 2025 (Anywhere on Earth) *Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline:* February 20, 2025 *Notification of acceptance:* March 1, 2025 *Camera-ready papers due:* March 10, 2025 (Anywhere on Earth) *Pre-recorded video due (hard deadline):* April 8, 2025 *Workshop dates at NAACL 2025:* May 3–4, 2025 *SCOPE* Based on the success of past low-resource machine translation (MT) workshops at AMTA 2018, MT Summit 2019, AACL-IJCNLP 2020, AMTA 2021, COLING 2022, EACL 2023, ACL 2024, we introduce LoResMT 2025 workshop at NAACL 2025. The workshop provides a discussion panel for researchers working on MT systems/methods for low-resource and under-represented languages in general. We would like to help review/overview the state of MT for low-resource languages and define the most important directions. We also solicit papers dedicated to supplementary NLP tools that are used in any language and especially in low-resource languages. Overview papers of these NLP tools are very welcome. It will be beneficial if the evaluations of these tools in research papers include their impact on the quality of MT output. *TOPICS* We are highly interested in (1) original research papers, (2) review/opinion papers, and (3) online systems on the topics below; however, we welcome all novel ideas that cover research on low-resource languages. - Neural machine translation (NMT) for low-resource languages - Use of LLMs (large language models) for low-resource MT systems - COVID-related corpora, their translations and corresponding NLP/MT systems - Work that presents online systems for practical use by native speakers - Word tokenizers/de-tokenizers for specific languages - Word/morpheme segmenters for specific languages - Alignment/Re-ordering tools for specific language pairs - Use of morphology analyzers and/or morpheme segmenters in MT - Multilingual/cross-lingual NLP tools for MT - Corpora creation and curation technologies for low-resource languages - Review of available parallel corpora for low-resource languages - Research and review papers on MT methods for low-resource languages - MT systems/methods (e.g. rule-based, SMT, NMT) for low-resource languages - Pivot MT for low-resource languages - Zero-shot MT for low-resource languages - Fast building of MT systems for low-resource languages - Re-usability of existing MT systems for low-resource languages - Machine translation for language preservation *SUBMISSION INFORMATION* We are soliciting two types of submissions: (1) research, review, and position papers and (2) system demonstration papers. For research, review and position papers, the length of each paper should be at least four (4) and not exceed eight (8) pages, plus unlimited pages for references. For system demonstration papers, the limit is four (4) pages. Submissions should be formatted according to the official ACL style templates (Overleaf). Please refer to the NAACL submission guideline for further information <https://2025.naacl.org/calls/papers/#paper-submission-details>. Accepted papers will be published at ACL Anthology in the NAACL 2025 and will be presented at the conference. Submissions must be anonymized and should be done using the provided submission system. Scientific papers that have been or will be submitted to other venues must be declared as such and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted and published at LoResMT. The review will be double-blind. Authors of an accepted paper should present their paper in person at NAACL 2025. Papers should be submitted in PDF to the LoResMT Open Review <https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2025/Workshop/LoResMT>. We would like to encourage authors to cite papers written in ANY language that are related to the topics, as long as both original bibliographic items and their corresponding English translations are provided. Registration is handled by the main conference (https://2025.naacl.org/). *ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (LISTED ALPHABETICALLY)* Atul Kr. Ojha, University of Galway Chao-Hong Liu, Potamu Research Ltd Ekaterina Vylomova, University of Melbourne, Australia Jade Abbott, Retro Rabbit Jonathan Washington, Swarthmore College Nathaniel Oco, National University (Philippines) Tommi A Pirinen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø Valentin Malykh, Huawei Noah’s Ark lab and Kazan Federal University Varvara Logacheva, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology Xiaobing Zhao, Minzu University of China *PROGRAM COMMITTEE (LISTED ALPHABETICALLY)* Abigail Walsh, ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland Alberto Poncelas, Rakuten, Singapore Ali Hatami, University of Galway Alina Karakanta, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), University of Trento Anna Currey, AWS AI Labs Aswarth Abhilash Dara, Walmart Global Technology Atul Kr. Ojha, University of Galway & Panlingua Language Processing LLP Bogdan Babych, Heidelberg University Chao-hong Liu, Potamu Research Ltd Constantine Lignos, Brandeis University, USA Daan van Esch, Google Dana Moukheiber, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ekaterina Vylomova, University of Melbourne, Australia Eleni Metheniti, CLLE-CNRS and IRIT-CNRS Flammie Pirinen, UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta Gaurav Negi, University of Galway Jinliang Lu, Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences John Philip McCrae, University of Galway Jonathan Washington, Swarthmore College Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Saarland University Majid Latifi, UPC University Maria Art Antonette Clariño, University of the Philippines Los Baños Milind Agarwal, George Mason University Mathias Müller, University of Zurich Nathaniel Oco, De La Salle University Pavel Rychlý, Masaryk University and Lexical Computing Pengwei Li, Meta Rashid Ahmad, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad Rico Sennrich, University of Zurich Santanu Pal, Wipro Sangjee Dondrub, Qinghai Normal University Sardana Ivanova, University of Helsinki Sourabrata Mukherjee, Charles University Thepchai Supnithi, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center Timothee Mickus, University of Helsinki Valentin Malykh, Huawei Noah’s Ark lab and Kazan Federal University Wen Lai, LMU Munich Xuebo Liu, Harbin Institute of Technolgy, Shenzhen Yalemisew Abgaz, Dublin City University Yasmin Moslem, Bering Lab Zhanibek Kozhirbayev, National Laboratory Astana, Nazarbayev University *CONTACT* Please email loresmt(a)googlegroups.com if you have any questions/comments/suggestions.

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CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab -- Call for Participation
by Firoj Alam 30 Dec '24

30 Dec '24

(apologies for cross-posting) Dear colleague, We invite you to participate in the 2025 edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2025. This year, we feature four tasks ---one follow-up and three new--- that correspond to important components within and around the full fact-checking pipeline in multiple languages: Task 1 Subjectivity in news articles. to spot text that should be processed with specific strategies; benefiting the fact-checking pipeline. Available in Arabic, English, Bulgarian, German, Italian, and Multilingual. Task 2 Claim Normalization. to simplify the primary claim made in the social media post into a concise form. This task is offered in 20 languages: English, Arabic, Bengali, Czech, German, Greek, French, Hindi, Korean, Marathi, Indonesian, Dutch, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai. Task 3 Fact-Checking Numerical Claims. to verify claims with numerical quantities and temporal expressions. Available in Arabic, English and Spanish. Task 4 Scientific Web Discourse Processing (SciWeb). to (a) classify different forms of science-related online discourse and (b) retrieve the scientific paper that serves as the source for the claim from a given pool of candidate scientific papers. Available in English. Register and participate: https://clef2025-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/registrationForm.php Further information: https://checkthat.gitlab.io/ Datasets: https://gitlab.com/checkthat_lab/clef2025-checkthat-lab Important Dates --------------------- - November 2024: Lab registration opens - December 2024: Release of the training materials - 25 April 2025: Lab registration closes - 30 April 2025: Beginning of the evaluation cycle (test sets release) - 10 May 2025 (23:59 AOE): End of the evaluation cycle (run submission) - 30 May 2025: Deadline for the submission of working notes [CEUR-WS] - 30 May – 27 June 2025: Review process of participant papers - 9 June 2025: Submission of Condensed Lab Overviews [LNCS] - 16 June 2025: Notification of Acceptance for Condensed Lab Overviews [LNCS] - 23 June 2025: Camera Ready Copy of Condensed Lab Overviews [LNCS] due - 27 June 2025: Notification of Acceptance for Participant Papers [CEUR-WS] - 7 July 2025: Camera Ready Copy of Participant Papers and Extended Lab Overviews [CEUR-WS] due - 21-25 July 2025: CEUR-WS Working Notes Preview for Checking by Authors and Lab Organizers - 9-12 September 2025: CLEF 2025 Conference in Madrid, Spain Best regards, The CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab Shared Task Organizers

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Call for workshop proposals: RANLP-2025: 15th Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
by Dola Mullage, Damith (Postgraduate Researcher) 28 Dec '24

28 Dec '24

Call for Workshop Proposals ================================================ RANLP-2025: 15th Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing Summer School DLinNLP 3-5 September 2025 (Wednesday-Friday) Tutorials 6-7 September 2025 (Saturday-Sunday) Main conference: 8-10 September 2025 (Monday-Wednesday) Workshops and Shared Tasks: 11-13 September 2025 (Thursday-Saturday) Varna, Bulgaria https://ranlp.org/ranlp2025/ ================================================ Following the workshops held in conjunction with the Conferences "Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing" RANLP-2005, RANLP-2007, RANLP-2009, RANLP-2011, RANLP-2013, RANLP-2015, RANLP-2017, RANLP-2019, RANLP-2021 and RANLP-2023, we are pleased to announce a call for workshop proposals for RANLP-2025. RANLP-2025 invites workshop proposals on any topic of interest to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community, ranging from fundamental research issues to more applied industrial or commercial aspects. We encourage workshops related to (or discussing the employment of) the latest NLP methods including Large Language Models/Generative AI. Workshops can vary in length from a half day to full 1-2 days and can also feature demo sessions. The format of each workshop (face-to-face or hybrid) can be determined by its organisers the condition being that onsite sessions are held in Varna for the whole workshop duration so that other RANLP participants can take part in the event. Accepted workshops will receive one free registration to RANLP-2025 (full registration including the summer school, tutorials, all workshops, main conference, reception, conference dinner). VENUE The workshops will take place in Hotel "Cherno More", Varna, the main RANLP-2025 conference venue. If more than 5 workshops are selected, the RANLP-2025 organisers will provide conference halls in some of the neighbouring hotels or universities in downtown Varna. IMPORTANT DATES Workshop proposals due: 15 March 2025 Workshop selection: 22 March 2025 Workshop website due: 5 April 2025 Workshop paper submission deadline (suggested): 30 June 2025, immediately after RANLP notification Workshop paper acceptance notification (suggested): 28 July 2025 Workshop paper camera-ready versions (suggested): 20 August 2025 Workshop camera-ready proceedings ready (suggested): 31 August 2025 Workshops: 11-13 September 2025 REQUIREMENTS Proposals should be no longer than five pages and should contain the following: 1. Title and brief technical description of the workshop, specifying the goals and the technical issues that it will focus on; 2. Brief description of the target audience, including estimates of the numbers of submissions and attendees (a tentative list of potential contributors would be useful); 3. List of related workshops/events held in the last three years or to be held in 2025; 4. Tentative workshop program committee; 5. Names and contact information (web page, email address) of the proposed organising committee; 6. Description of the experience of the proposed organisers in the workshop topics and in organising workshops or related events. The workshop Organising Committee is responsible for the following: * Setting up and maintaining the workshop website; * Disseminating call for papers/participation; * Organising paper submission, review process, authors notification, and collecting audio/visual presentation requirements; * Verifying the camera-ready copies, providing electronic conference proceedings which are to be generated with the conference management system START; * In case of hybrid workshops, organising an onsite workshop component and chairing the live sessions in Varna. Workshop invited speakers: If the workshop organisers intend to host an invited talk, it is recommended that they invite somebody from the main conference keynote speakers or participants. If the workshop organisers decide to invite another speaker, it is very likely that the workshop organisers will have to secure financial support for this speaker. The RANLP-2025 Organising Committee is responsible for the following: * Providing a link to the workshop web page; * Publishing the workshop proceedings with ISBN numbers, and registering DOI numbers for all accepted papers; * Providing the workshop venue; * Organising registration, audio/visual support, coffee breaks, registration facilities, Internet access. WORKSHOP PROPOSAL SUBMISSION Workshop proposals in PDF format should be e-mailed to Tharindu Ranasinghe <t.ranasinghe[at]lancaster[dot]ac[dot]uk>, Kiril Simov <kivs[at]bultreebank[dot]org>, Petya Osenova <petya[at]bultreebank[dot]org> and cc'ed to <workshops2025(a)ranlp.org<mailto:workshops2025@ranlp.org>> EVALUATION Submitted proposals will be reviewed with respect to the following criteria: * Relevance, importance, and timeliness of the topics; * Completeness, clarity, and quality of the workshop proposal; * Experience of the organisers in the proposed topics; * Viability of the workshop. THE TEAM BEHIND RANLP-25 Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Chair Organising Committee) Ruslan Mitkov, University of Lancaster, UK (Chair Programme Commitee) Nikolai Nikolov, Bulgarian Association for Computational Linguistics, Bulgaria Tharindu Ranasinghe, Lancaster University, UK (Workshops Chair and Shared tasks Co-Chair) Saad Ezzini, Lancaster University, UK (Sponsorship Chair and Shared tasks Co-Chair) Maria Kunilovskaya, Saarland University, Germany (Publication Chair) Preslav Nakov, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE Ivelina Nikolova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshops Co-Chair) Petya Osenova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshops Co-Chair)

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Call for papers : Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP) 2025
by Dola Mullage, Damith (Postgraduate Researcher) 28 Dec '24

28 Dec '24

RECENT ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Varna, Bulgaria http://ranlp.org/ranlp2025/ Summer School on Deep Learning and LLMs for NLP: 3-5 September 2025 (Wednesday-Friday) Tutorials: 6-7 September 2025 (Saturday-Sunday) Main Conference: 8-10 September 2025 (Monday-Wednesday) Workshops and shared tasks: 11-13 September 2025 (Thursday-Saturday) The biennial RANLP (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing) conference is one of the most competitive and influential NLP conferences. The event grew out of the International Summer schools "Contemporary topics in Computational Linguistics" which were organised for many years as international training events. Previous RANLP conferences (1995, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023) featured keynote talks by leading experts in NLP as well as presentations/papers of high quality, rigorously reviewed by Programme Committee experts. Since 2009, the papers accepted at RANLP and the associated workshops are included in the ACL Anthology. The RANLP proceedings are indexed by SCOPUS and DBLP. The Proceedings has its own Scopus SJR, in 2023 it is 0,299. The conference will be preceded by a Summer School on Deep Learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) for Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well as tutorials on current topics of particular interest and cutting edge technologies. RANLP-2025 will be followed by specialised workshops as well as shared tasks covering timely NLP topics. A Student Research Workshop will be held in parallel with the main conference. The Student Research Workshops (now the 9th edition) have become active discussion fora for young researchers. TOPICS We invite papers reporting recent advances in all aspects of Natural Language Processing and particularly encourage submissions related to (and the employment of) the latest NLP methods including Large Language Models/Generative AI. Contributions from a broad range of areas will be welcome including, but not limited to, the following topics: phonetics, phonology, morphology; syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics, dialogue, lexicon; complexity; mathematical, statistical, machine learning and deep learning models; language resources and corpora; crowdsourcing for creation of linguistic resources; electronic dictionaries, terminologies and ontologies; sublanguages and controlled languages; linked data; POS tagging; parsing; semantic role labelling; word-sense disambiguation; multiword expressions and computational phraseology; textual entailment; anaphora resolution; temporal processing; language generation; speech recognition; text-to-speech synthesis; multilingual NLP; machine translation, translation memory systems and computer-aided translation tools, text simplification and readability estimation; knowledge acquisition; information retrieval; text categorisation; information extraction; text summarisation; terminology extraction; question answering; opinion mining and sentiment analysis; fact checking and fake news; stance recognition; hate speech and aggression detection; author profiling; dialogue systems; chatbots and conversational agents; irony and sarcasm detection; negation and speculation detection; computer-aided language learning; multimodal systems; language and vision; NLP for biomedical texts; NLP for educational applications; NLP for healthcare; NLP for financial purposes; NLP for legal texts; for the Semantic web; theoretical and application-orientated papers related to NLP. CHAIR OF THE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Ruslan Mitkov (University of Lancaster) CHAIR OF THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE Galia Angelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) The Programme Committee (PC) members are distinguished NLP experts from all over the world. The list of PC members will be announced at the conference website in due time. Keynote speakers, tutorial presenters, and summer school lecturers and tutors will be announced in the upcoming calls for papers. WORKSHOPS and SHARED TASKS: The RANLP 2025 workshops and shared tasks will be held on 11-13 September 2025. Calls for Proposals of Workshop and Shared Tasks have been already published. SUBMISSION OF PAPERS, POSTERS, DEMOS The submissions will be maintained by the conference management software START. For further instructions, please follow the submission information at the conference website at https://ranlp.org/ranlp2025/. The reviewing process will be anonymous. Double submission is acceptable, but authors will be asked to declare it at the time of submission. Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the Programme Committee. Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines regarding how to produce camera-ready versions of their papers for inclusion in the proceedings. All RANLP papers have DOI numbers assigned. The full conference proceedings will be uploaded on the ACL Anthology. RANLP-2025 aims to provide early notification of acceptance to authors and presenters who need visa to enter Bulgaria. We invite early submissions of authors’ names and paper abstracts, in order to plan quick reviewing. Access to the conference management software will be available as from 1 April 2025. IMPORTANT DATES Call for Shared Tasks proposals: September 2024 Shared Tasks selection notification: 4 November 2024 Shared Tasks sample data and task website ready: 15 November 2024 Shared Tasks training data ready: 15 December 2024 Call for workshop proposals: 24 December 2024 Deadline for submission of workshop proposals: 15 March 2025 Workshop selection: 22 March 2025 Conference abstracts submission: April 2025 Conference papers submission: early/mid May 2025 (please check exact dates on RANLP 2025 website) Conference papers acceptance notification: 28 June 2025 Camera-ready versions of the conference papers: 31 July 2025 Workshop paper submission deadline (suggested): 30 June 2025 Workshop paper acceptance notification (suggested): 28 July 2025 Workshop paper camera-ready versions (suggested): 20 August 2025 Workshop camera-ready proceedings ready (suggested): 31 August 2025 RANLP Summer School on Deep Learning in NLP: 3-5 September 2025 RANLP tutorials: 6-7 September 2025 (Saturday-Sunday) RANLP conference: 8-10 September 2025 (Monday-Wednesday) RANLP workshops and Shared Tasks presentations: 11-13 September 2025 (Thursday-Saturday) VENUE RANLP 2025 will be held at the conference facilities of Hotel “Cherno More” (http://www.chernomorebg.com ) in Varna, the largest city on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. The event venue is centrally located at the entrance of the Sea Garden and offers excellent conference facilities. The city is a major tourist destination with flights to/from the Varna International Airport. It is also known for its Archaeological Museum, which features the oldest gold treasure in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_Necropolis). The conference organisers plan to organise an excursion to Provadia, the oldest salt-production and urban centre in Europe (5600 - 4350 BC, https://provadia-solnitsata.com/en/ ) which is located 50 km from Varna. THE TEAM BEHIND RANLP-25 Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Chair Organising Committee) Ruslan Mitkov, University of Lancaster, UK (Chair Programme Commitee) Nikolai Nikolov, Bulgarian Association for Computational Linguistics, Bulgaria Tharindu Ranasinghe, Lancaster University, UK (Workshops Chair and Shared tasks Co-Chair) Saad Ezzini, Lancaster University, UK (Sponsorship Chair and Shared tasks Co-Chair) Maria Kunilovskaya, Saarland University, Germany (Publication Chair) Preslav Nakov, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE Ivelina Nikolova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshops Co-Chair) Petya Osenova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshops Co-Chair)

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Second CFP JCNN Special Session Explainable Deep Neural Networks for Responsible AI (DeepXplain 2025)
by Francielle Vargas 26 Dec '24

26 Dec '24

*** Second Call for Papers *** We invite paper submissions to the Explainable Deep Neural Networks for Responsible AI: Post-Hoc and Self-Explaining Approaches (DeepXplain 2025), a special session at IJCNN 2025 dedicated to innovative methodologies for improving the interpretability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), while addressing fairness and bias mitigation. Website: https://deepxplain.github.io/ Important Dates: - Submission link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IJCNN2025/ - Submission deadline: January 15, 2025 - Notification date: March 15, 2025 - Camera-ready submission: May 1, 2025 Contributions This special session aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, promote the ethical design of AI systems, and encourage the development of benchmarks and datasets for explainability research. Our goal is to advance both post-hoc and intrinsic interpretability approaches, bridging the gap between the high performance of deep neural networks and their transparency. By doing so, we seek to enhance human trust in these models and mitigate the risks of negative social impacts. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - Theoretical advancements in post-hoc explanation methods (e.g., LIME, SHAP, Grad-CAM) for DNNs. - Development of inherently interpretable architectures using self-explaining mechanisms, such as attention-based or saliency-based models, prototype networks, and SENNs (Self-Explaining Neural Networks). - Post-hoc and self-explaining methods for Large Language Models (LLMs). - Application-driven explainability insights, particularly in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. - Ethical evaluations of DNN-based AI models with a focus on reducing bias and social impact. - Methods, metrics, and methodologies for improving interpretability and fairness in DNNs. - Ethical discussions about the social impact of non-transparent AI models. - Datasets and benchmarking tools for explainability. - Explainable AI in critical applications: healthcare, governance, misinformation, hate speech, etc. Submission Information We welcome submissions of academic papers (both long and short) across the spectrum of theoretical and practical work, including research ideas, methods, tools, simulations, applications or demonstrations, practical evaluations, position papers, and surveys. Submissions must be written in English, adhere to the IJCNN-2025 formatting guidelines, and be submitted as a single PDF file. *Organizers* - Francielle Vargas <https://franciellevargas.github.io/>, University of São Paulo, Brazil - Roseli Romero <https://sites.icmc.usp.br/rafrance/>, University of São Paulo, Brazil - Jackson Trager <https://www.jacksonptrager.com/>, University of Southern California, USA

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Neurocognition, Language and Visual Processing (NLVP) talk series, Jan 2025 (Zoom and University of Exeter)
by h.dong2＠exeter.ac.uk 24 Dec '24

24 Dec '24

Dear all A correction of the previous seminar talk - the time should be **GMT**. Also please see the information for the upcoming seminar. ***Seminar 2: Thursday, 16 Jan 2025, 15:00 to 16:00, GMT (London time)*** Speaker: Prof Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome) Title: What's Behind Text? The Long, Challenging Path Towards a Unified Language-Independent Representation of Meaning Abstract: In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), the pursuit of a unified, language-independent representation of meaning remains both essential and complex. This talk revisits the rationale for advancing semantic understanding beyond the capabilities of LLMs and highlights the development of a large-scale multilingual inter-task resource like MOSAICo and the design of innovative methods that bridge word- and sentence-level meanings across languages. I will also explore how building a robust, multilingual framework for interpreting meaning with greater precision and depth enhances the quality and reliability of system outputs, including text generated by LLMs. Speaker's short bio: Roberto Navigli is Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the Sapienza NLP Group. He has received two ERC grants on lexical and sentence-level multilingual semantics, highlighted among the 15 projects through which the ERC transformed science. He received several prizes, including two Artificial Intelligence Journal prominent paper awards and several outstanding/best paper awards from ACL. He is the co-founder of Babelscape, a successful deep-tech company which enables NLU in dozens of languages. He served as Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal (2013-2020) and Program Co-Chair of ACL-IJCNLP 2021. He is a Fellow of ACL, ELLIS and EurAI and currently serves as General Chair of ACL 2025. Check past and upcoming seminars at the following url: https://sites.google.com/view/neurocognit-lang-viz-group/seminars. Best regards Hang Dong (https://computerscience.exeter.ac.uk/staff/hd524) on behalf of the NLVP group (https://sites.google.com/view/neurocognit-lang-viz-group/members)

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First CFP: 21st Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2025) @NAACL2025
by Atul K. Ojha 23 Dec '24

23 Dec '24

[Apologies for cross-postings] ******************************************************************************** First Call for Papers 21st Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2025) Organized, sponsored and endorsed by SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the ACL Full-day workshop collocated with NAACL 2025, Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A., May 3 or 4, 2025 Hybrid (on-site & on-line) Submission deadline: January 30, 2025 MWE 2025 website: <https://multiword.org/mwe2022/> https://multiword.org/mwe2025/ ******************************************************************************** Multiword expressions (MWEs), i.e., word combinations that exhibit lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and/or statistical idiosyncrasies (Baldwin and Kim, 2010), such as “by and large”, “hot dog”, “make a decision” and “break one's leg” are still a pain in the neck for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The notion encompasses closely related phenomena: idioms, compounds, light-verb constructions, phrasal verbs, rhetorical figures, collocations, institutionalized phrases, etc. Given their irregular nature, MWEs often pose complex problems in linguistic modeling (e.g. annotation), NLP tasks (e.g. parsing), and end-user applications (e.g. natural language understanding and Machine Translation), hence still representing an open issue for computational linguistics (Constant et al., 2017). For more than two decades, modelling and processing MWEs for NLP has been the topic of the MWE workshop organised by the MWE section <https://multiword.org/> of ACL-SIGLEX <http://www.siglex.org/> in conjunction with major NLP conferences since 2003. Impressive progress has been made in the field, but our understanding of MWEs still requires much research considering their need and usefulness in NLP applications. This is also relevant to domain-specific NLP pipelines that need to tackle terminologies most often realised as MWEs. Following previous years, for this 21st edition of the workshop, we identified the following topics on which contributions are particularly encouraged: - MWE processing to enhance end-user applications. MWEs gained particular attention in end-user applications, including Machine Translation (MT) (Zaninello and Birch, 2020), simplification (Kochmar et al., 2020), language learning and assessment (Paquot et al., 2020), social media mining (Pelosi et al., 2017), and abusive language detection (Zampieri et al. 2020). We believe that it is crucial to extend and deepen these first attempts to integrate and evaluate MWE technology in these and further end-user applications. - MWE processing and identification in the general language, as well as in specialized languages and domains: Multiword terminology extraction from domain-specific corpora (Lossio-Ventura et al, 2014) is of particular importance to various applications, such as MT (Semmar and Laib, 2017), or for the identification and monitoring of neologisms and technical jargon (Chatzitheodorou and Kappatos, 2021). - MWE processing in low-resource languages: The PARSEME shared tasks (2017 <https://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=CONF&page=CONF_05_MWE_2…>, 2018 <https://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=CONF&page=CONF_04_LAW-M…>, 2020 <https://multiword.sourceforge.net/PHITE.php?sitesig=CONF&page=CONF_02_MWE-L…>) among others, have fostered significant progress in MWE identification, providing datasets that include low-resource languages, evaluation measures, and tools that now allow fully integrating MWE identification into end-user applications. There are continuous efforts in this direction (Diaz Hernandez, 2024) and a few of them have also explored methods for the automatic interpretation of MWEs (Bhatia et al., 2018), and their processing in low-resource languages (Eder et al., 2021). Resource creation and sharing should be pursued in parallel with the development of multilingual benchmarks for MWE identification (Savary et al., 2023). - MWE identification and interpretation in LLMs: Most current MWE processing is limited to their identification and detection using pre-trained language models, but we still lack understanding about how MWEs are represented and dealt with therein (Garcia et al., 2021), how to better model the compositionality of MWEs from semantics (Phelps et al., 2024). Now that NLP has shifted towards end-to-end neural models like BERT, capable of solving complex tasks with little or no intermediary linguistic symbols, questions arise about the extent to which MWEs should be implicitly or explicitly modelled (Shwartz and Dagan, 2019). - New and enhanced representation of MWEs in language resources and computational models of compositionality as gold standards for formative intrinsic evaluation. Through this workshop, we will bring together and encourage researchers in various NLP subfields to submit their MWE-related research, We also intend to consolidate the converging results of previous joint workshops LAW-MWE-CxG 2018 <http://multiword.sourceforge.net/lawmwecxg2018/>, MWE-WN 2019 <http://multiword.sourceforge.net/mwewn2019/> and MWE-LEX 2020 <http://multiword.sourceforge.net/mwelex2020/>, the joint MWE-WOAH panel in 2021 <https://multiword.org/mwe2021/#program>, the MWE-SIGUL 2022 joint session <https://multiword.org/mwe2022/>, and the MWE-UD 2024 <https://multiword.org/mweud2024/>, extending our scope to MWEs in e-lexicons, and WordNets, MWE annotation, as well as grammatical constructions. Correspondingly, we call for papers on research related (but not limited) to MWEs and constructions in: - Computationally-applicable theoretical work in psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics; - Annotation (expert, crowdsourcing, automatic) and representation in resources such as corpora, treebanks, e-lexicons, WordNets, constructions (also for low-resource languages); - Processing in syntactic and semantic frameworks (e.g. CCG, CxG, HPSG, LFG, TAG, UD, etc.); - Discovery and identification methods, including for specialized languages and domains such as clinical or biomedical NLP; - Interpretation of MWEs and understanding of text containing them; - Language acquisition, language learning, and non-standard language (e.g. tweets, speech); - Evaluation of annotation and processing techniques; - Retrospective comparative analyses from the PARSEME shared tasks; - Processing for end-user applications (e.g. MT, NLU, summarisation, language learning, etc.); - Implicit and explicit representation in pre-trained language models and end-user applications; - Evaluation and probing of pre-trained language models; - Resources and tools (e.g. lexicons, identifiers) and their integration into end-user applications; - Multiword terminology extraction; - Adaptation and transfer of annotations and related resources to new languages and domains including low-resource ones. Submission formats: The workshop invites two types of submissions: - archival submissions that present substantially original research in both long paper format (8 pages + references) and short paper format (4 pages + references). - non-archival submissions of abstracts describing relevant research presented/published elsewhere which will not be included in the MWE proceedings. Paper submission and templates Papers should be submitted via the workshop's submission page <https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2025/Workshop/MWE> ( https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2025/Workshop/MWE). Please choose the appropriate submission format (archival/non-archival). Archival papers with existing reviews will also be accepted through the ACL Rolling Review. Submissions must follow the ACL stylesheet <https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files>. Important Dates Paper Submission Deadline: January 30, 2025 Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2025 Camera-ready papers due: March 10, 2025 Workshop: May 3 or 4, 2025 All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth). Organizing Committee Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Voula Giouli, Grazina Korvel, A. Seza Doğruöz, Alexandre Rademaker, Atul Kr. Ojha, Mathieu Constant Anti-harassment policy The workshop follows the ACL anti-harassment policy <https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Anti-Harassment_Policy>. Contact For any inquiries regarding the workshop, please send an email to the Organizing Committee at mweworkshop2023(a)googlegroups.com.

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PhD position: Language Modeling and Machine Learning
by Dietrich Klakow 23 Dec '24

23 Dec '24

PhD position: Language Modeling and Machine Learning =========================================== (Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Physics, Mathematics or similar) The research group is focusing on getting a deeper understanding of how language models work and how they can be applied. Our recent achievements include a best paper award at COLING 2022 and a best theme paper award at ACL 2023. Possible more specific topics could be: * Understanding and interpreting language models * Language models for Chemical Compounds and Proteins * Deep learning for highly non-linear Dynamical Systems The ideal candidate for the position would have: 1. Excellent knowledge of LLMs, machine learning and deep learning 2. Excellent programming skills 3. Masters degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Physics, Mathematics or similar 4. Successful experiences working both independently and as part of a small team Salary: The PhD position will be 75% of full time on the German E13 scale (TV-L) which is about 3292€ per month before tax and social security contributions. The appointments will be for three years with a possible extension at 50% for a fourth year. About the department: The department of Language Science and Technology is one of the leading departments in the speech and language area in Europe. The flagship project at the moment is the CRC on Information Density and Linguistic Encoding. It also runs a significant number of European and nationally funded projects. In total, it has seven faculty and around 50 postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. The department is part of the Saarland Informatics Campus. With 900 researchers, two Max Planck institutes and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, it is one of the leading locations for Informatics in Germany and Europe. How to apply: Please send us a letter of motivation, your CV, your transcripts, if available a list of publications, and the names and contact information of at least two references, as a single PDF or a link to a PDF if the file size is more than 5 MB. Please apply latest by January 19th, 2025. Contact: Applications and any further inquiries regarding our research should be directed to dietrich.klakow(a)lsv.uni-saarland.de

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